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The significance of environmental governance is increasing worldwide, and Georgia is no exception. This article uses wide-ranging sources to provide comprehensive qualitative and quantitative data to discuss the most important aspects of environmental policy directions in Georgia. The results of the study show that: (a) it is crucial to increase public awareness about the importance of climate change and environmental protection; (b) introducing environmental and climate-related goals and objectives and green budgeting principles in national priorities is as important as implementing them effectively into practice; and (c) the practice of regulatory impact assessment needs further development in Georgia, especially in the environment and climate-related areas. Finally, the paper concludes that the lack of historical data is the main limitation for the current research, and proposes that scientific and practical work continues in the future to further explore the relationships between the country’s environmental policies and aspects of sustainable development on both an individual and public level.

This research examines the complex relationship between environmental governance, sustainable development, and the role of government institutions in Bangladesh. The study extensively examines the evolution of environmental governance, focusing on the establishment and functions of key institutions such as the Ministry of Environment and Forests, the Department of Environment, the Department of Forest, the Bangladesh Water Development Board, the Forest Research Institute, etc. Relying solely on secondary sources, the methodology involved a comprehensive review and analysis of scholarly literature, policy documents, and reports to explore the nation's environmental trajectory. The findings underscore the commendable socio-economic progress achieved by Bangladesh compared to pressing environmental challenges. Rising carbon emissions, limited forest coverage, water resource mismanagement, and threats to biodiversity underscore the urgency for balanced and sustainable development. Government institutions, through policy formulation, implementation, research, and conservation efforts, play pivotal roles in addressing these challenges. However, the research highlights the imperative for a paradigm shift, emphasizing the need to integrate environmental considerations into development policies comprehensively. Bridging the gap between economic growth and environmental sustainability requires concerted efforts, policy reforms, and public engagement. This study emphasizes the pivotal role of government institutions, collaborative efforts, and policy reforms in leading the nation towards a more sustainable future.

The use of tropes is a defining feature of resource regulation and is fundamental to both the way legal theories have evolved and to the practical, localized interpretations and implementations of law. This article offers a discursive study of the "water thief" trope in order to clarify the ways in which language users are able to perform and construe broader notions about individual and communal rights to water. I underline the palpable shift from a conventional law-based account of theft to a logic incorporating key characteristics of criminality and immorality. The study builds on critical discourse analysis to show how the water thief trope creates a new water world in which "water thieves," although technically not criminals under formal law, are created and made to matter.

In Zambia, early models of natural resource governance were based on state-centric approaches to conservation and later, to some degree, based on Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) models. Both of the models delivered poorly in terms of improved biodiversity management, enhanced rural livelihoods, and rights-based benefits. A lack of productive dialogue, involvement, and participation of local communities in natural resource governance resulted in considerable conflicts between protected area managers and local communities, with substantial local political and socio-economic costs. Through a mixed-methods approach using a questionnaire, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews, the Environmental Governance Systems (EGS) framework was applied to compare how interactions among political, economic, and civil society actors influence resource use and the state of resources in the state-led Kaingu chiefdom and the community-managed Kaindu Community Conservancy. Results show limited communication, cooperation, and coordination among the actors in both cases. Conflicting interests over the use of land, wildlife, forests, and fisheries among actors have led to strained relationships, limited interactions, and many negative outcomes in both cases. Both protected areas exhibit a top-down structure of natural resources governance with limited community participation, conflictual relationships among actors, corruption, lack of transparency, and low accountability. The CBNRM structures and processes need to be changed legislatively to improve local ownership and a sense of responsibility and legitimacy by restructuring the constitutions of CBNRM organizations and developing their human resource, financial, and logistical capacities. The study proposes a proactive transformative model for mitigating negative impacts on the state of resources and resource use.

Mini-lateral ‘clubs’ occupy an increasingly prominent place in the international environmental governance landscape. Yet few studies have looked at how differences between clubs influence the results they produce. This paper aims to fill this gap in understanding by testing hypotheses on how different clubs' membership constellations and leadership (connected to large events) affect ambitions in outcome documents of the G7 and the G20. It tests those hypotheses by employing text and data analytic techniques to compare stated ambitions in environmental documents of G7 and G20 over the past two decades. The analysis reveals that the G7’s language is generally stronger than the G20; and that strategic leadership connected to large events may contribute to raising those ambitions. These findings highlight the importance of mini-lateral clubs as forms of environmental governance and, more generally, illustrates the use of text mining in environmental governance research.

Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming environmental decision-making processes that operate beyond the state. However, political ecologists, drawing from a diverse set of theoretical frameworks, have critiqued the concept for being malleable, vague, and apolitical, which has enabled its appropriation in ways that conceal inequality and difference, advocate techno-managerial fixes, and espouse neoliberal solutions. Political ecologists have approached EG more critically with the conceptual tools of neoliberal natures, environmental regulation, and eco-governmentality. In this article, we contend that these conceptualizations, while theoretically rich, are limited in their capacity to capture a diversity of governance contexts, processes, and actors and to drive both scholarly analysis and radical change. Thus, we put forward a conceptual framework of relational environmental governance (REG) that captures the dynamic and unequal interactions among heterogeneous human and non-human actors by which socio-ecological arrangements are structured, controlled, and transformed. Drawing from a variety of relational traditions, the framework comprises four key "moves" related to i) ontological understandings of EG processes as full of unequal power relations and heterogeneous actors, ii) epistemological privileging of intersections among racialized, gendered, queer and/or alternative or Indigenous knowledges in EG processes, iii) methodological emphasis on conducting research relationally with diverse EG actors, and iv) a praxis of engagement with EG processes to change how socio-ecologies are controlled and address crises of sustainability.

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Although uncertainty is a fundamental feature and challenge of environmental governance, the literature on how policy makers and resource managers can act effectively under that uncertainty is scarce. The focus is on managing scientific uncertainty, a lack of knowledge about the causes or consequences of an environmental problem or decision, when many other types of uncertainty can have drastic effects on decision makers’ ability to make timely, rational, or even satisficing decisions. Moreover, although suggestions on how to manage these uncertainties often revolve around collaborative governance, i.e., engaging scientists, decision makers, communities, and other stakeholders in joint decision making, collaboration is often framed as a one-size-fits-all approach. I aimed to broaden the conversation about collaboration as a tool for managing uncertainty, using a 4-year ethnographic study of a collaborative process to develop the operating license for a hydropower dam in California. Numerous types of uncertainties arose during the 4 years of negotiation, and these uncertainties often interacted in messy and hard-to-predict ways. Collaboration, especially creating the process and structure to openly discuss uncertainty, was an important tool for stakeholders to handle the uncertainties that arose, but it was insufficient to address all uncertainties. By exploring the many types of uncertainty that arose during negotiations, whether and how collaboration served to address these varieties of uncertainty, and how uncertainty affected the collaborative process, I aimed to add nuance to our understanding of when and where collaboration is a helpful tool for environmental decision makers.

This article presents This article presents findings from a transdisciplinary research project on collaborative practices for the sustainable management of natural resources (SMNR) in Wales. Here, the legislation establishes that the national well-being agenda and the principle of SMNR in environmental governance must be achieved through collaborative and participatory practices, across sectors and organisations, including within the public sector. However, neoliberal and hyper-bureaucratic governance structures, characterized by a risk-adverse nature, do not allow public sector institutional actors to experiment and engage with such practices in their everyday work. This article discusses a collective experience of reflecting on, and challenging such oppressing neoliberal structures, through experimenting with alternative ways of doing and being together. The emerging community at the heart of this experience is composed of policymakers, practitioners, artists, and academics (including the authors), who together carved out a 'site of negotiation' to contest techno-managerialism and mere rational approaches to (natural resources) governance. In the course of this research, these actors began to collectively create and shape new and shared meanings of doing collaborative and cross-boundary work (as required by the Welsh legislation), based on relationships of trust, reflexivity, embodiment, and relationality. Reflecting also on our own experience (and interpretation) of working alongside them, we believe that such emergent processes of collective meaning-making have the potential to transform neoliberal (environmental) governance structures into 'lived' and 'owned' institutions. Inspired by relational, integrative and caring forms of democratic governance, we argue that professionals in public sector organisations can realign governance structures in ways that meet the challenge of enabling the rapid and wide sustainability transformations that are so desperately needed.

The role of science in environmental decision-making calls for an improved understanding of how scientific advice can best inform policy. Policy-relevant science is trapped in the conundrum of being close to policy and politics while trying not to become too close, to avoid politicization. We investigate this dilemma in three scientific advisory organizations: the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Comparing marine, climate, and biodiversity governance at the international level, we reveal how the science-policy interface is understood and arranged in the institutional designs of these organizations. While they are all mandated to be policy-relevant, they aim to provide a neutral space for science that is not overtly impacted by politics. Our analysis reveals key differences in science-policy interactions regarding four issues: mandate; science-policy separation; politicization of advisory science; and knowledge inclusion. After discussing how these dimensions exhibit challenges connected to the 'proximity vs. distance' dilemma, we formulate an ideal-typical continuum comprising the following arrangements: a clear-cut boundary, a boundary zone, a fuzzy boundary. Based on this three-tiered model, we argue for a non-dichotomous understanding of science-policy relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PanAfrican Journal of Governance and Development (PJGD) is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of Jimma University that publishes editorials, research articles, book reviews, commentaries, and notes. PJGD offers a platform for the expression of new scientific inquiries to intellectuals of the world in general and Africa & Ethiopia in particular to reflect on how governance and development can be promoted, strengthened, and consolidated. The biannual edition is published in February and August of each year only in English language. PJGD is APC Free Journal. PJGD accepts scientific works focused on the diversified areas of Governance and Development drawn from multiple disciplines of Political Science and International Relations, Public Management, Leadership, Development Economics, Environmental Governance, Peace and Conflict, Human Rights, National and International Law, Globalization, Public Policy, Regional and International Organizations, Gender, Peace and Conflict Management, International Political Economy, Multiculturalism, Civil Society, and related areas.

Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) are prominent governance instruments that define and verify sustainable agricultural land use at farm and supply chain levels. However, agricultural production can prompt spillover dynamics with implications for sustainability that go beyond these scales, e.g., through runoff of chemical inputs or long-distance migrant worker flows. Scientific evidence on the governance of spillovers through VSS is, however, limited. This study investigates the extent to which VSS regulate a set of 21 environmental and socio-economic spillovers of agricultural land use. To this end, we assessed the spillover coverage in 100 sustainability standards. We find that VSS have a clear tendency to cover environmental spillovers more extensively than socio-economic spillovers. Further, we show how spillover coverage differs across varying types of standard-setting organizations and VSS verification mechanisms. Finally, we discuss the role and limitations that VSS can have in addressing the revealed gaps.

The PanAfrican Journal of Governance and Development (PJGD) is a peer-reviewed biannual, multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary journal that publishes editorials, articles, essays, book reviews, commentaries, and notes on issues related to democracy, good governance, development, and peace in Ethiopia and Africa. The biannual edition will be published in February and August of each year with the status of “Double-Blind Peer Review-Journal”.

This paper challenges Earth System Governance (ESG) scholars to rethink the concept of Planetary Justice (PJ) in the era of the Anthropocene so it is more attentive to non-Western perspectives and sensitive to the experiences of Indigenous peoples. We combine findings from a narrative review with those derived from academic collaborations with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band to propose the Indigenous principle of ‘justice as healing’ through ‘recognition’ as a crucial element in the emerging PJ framework. We argue that healing can be initiated by acknowledging colonialism as a driving force behind socio-environmental injustices, centering state accountability in environmental governance decision-making, and recognizing the value of restoring Indigenous knowledges and practices. Ultimately, we argue healing is the responsibility of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. ESG scholars have an important role to play in supporting healing and enacting recognition within and among Indigenous peoples through their engagements with Native communities.

Many democracies find it difficult to act swiftly on problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss. This is reflected in long-standing debates in research and policy about whether democratic practices are capable of fostering timely, large-scale transformations towards sustainability. Drawing on an integrative review of scholarly literature from 2011 to early 2021 on sustainability transformations and the democracy-environment nexus, this article synthesises existing research on prospects and pitfalls for democratising sustainability transformations. We advance a new typology for understanding various combinations of democratic/authoritarian practices and of transformations towards/away from sustainability. We then explore the role of democratic practices in accelerating or obstructing five key dimensions of sustainability transformations: institutional, social, economic, technological, and epistemic. Across all dimensions we find substantial evidence that democratic practices can foster transformations towards sustainability, and we conclude by outlining a set of associated policy recommendations.

Digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and remote sensing are increasingly used by public and private actors to improve the participation of smallholders in addressing the environmental challenges of food production. Based on an empirical mapping of 10 digital sustainability initiatives we analyse how digital technologies shape the representations of (un)sustainable production practices, the identification of sustainability targets and intervention strategies for improving environmental performance. Based on this mapping we distinguish three archetypes of smallholder participation engendered by digital technology that we label ‘the tutorial’, ‘the dashboard’ and ‘the platform’. The archetypes provide a basis for understanding how digitalization, as a process of design-based governance, can overcome, replicate or even reinforce the barriers to participation faced by analog sustainability initiatives. Applied more widely we argue this typology can provide a productive means of examining the role of digitalization in contributing to more inclusive and sustainable food systems.

The research addresses the complexities of the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directives (EU RED and RED II), contextualising them within the palm oil sector in Southeast Asia, in which Indonesia and Malaysia are known to be the two largest producers and exporters of palm oil. It aims to question the effect of this expanding role of markets on power dynamics and political processes. Examining these developments at different organisational scales highlights the asymmetrical power relations that circulate through such transboundary networks to shape patterns of resource access and the distribution of environmental risks. Employing a qualitative approach, the research uses case study method to reflect on how market forces and broad political dynamics establish the hybrid environmental governance regime of biofuels. The research concludes that this transboundary market approach to biofuels and palm oil should be regarded with caution, as it (1) lowers regulatory quality within the biofuels sustainability regime, (2) undermines the sustainable palm oil market, and (3) indirectly bolsters unsustainable practices outside the palm oil sector.

Research on environmental governance would benefit from greater attention to the practices, agency and subjectivities of the frontline civil servants who implement and shape environmental policies and interventions on the ground. These actors conduct the everyday work of bringing global agreements and state policies into being. In doing so, they influence how citizens experience the state and environmental governance. In this review paper, we provide a brief overview of existing literature on ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs). We then suggest three key research areas through which insights into the role of SLBs in environmental governance could be further developed, including (i) the nature of SLBs agency and practice as they enact global and national environmental agendas, (ii) the subjectivities of SLBs and how they affect environmental governance and (iii) the outcomes of the activities of SLBs on state-citizen relations. This research agenda has explanatory power in understanding existing and desired environmental governance.

In Brazil, the looming threat of mass extinction has prompted increasingly exceptional measures to protect sensitive biomes. At the same time, such measures threaten to curtail capitalist expansion and thus Brazil's neoliberal model of economic development. Jair Bolsonaro's 2018 presidential campaign responded to these threats by fueling anti-environment sentiments and anti-environmentalist enmity. Once inaugurated, he immediately began the work of dismantling national environmental governance structures. Yet his strategies for doing so are often masked by what this article describes as a 'firehouse effect', where his tactics appear chaotic, confused, and lacking any particular goal. The article uses a combination of interviews with 35 environmental experts, participant observation, and a review of secondary sources to zoom in on Bolsonaro's anti-environmentalism within the context of the contemporary turn toward populist authoritarian neoliberalism. By focusing on how Bolsonaro's policies serve to weaken protective environmental measures that limit capitalist extraction, the article unearths the major anti-environment strategies of the Bolsonaro administration. This framework thus allows us to see through the 'firehouse effect' to make some sense of Bolsonaro's methods, further building on emerging research on the political ecologies of the contemporary populist authoritarian neoliberal turn. Moreover, the article shows the utility of applying a generalized populist authoritarian neoliberal framework to a particular context in order to identify its local processes and specificities.

In an increasingly globalised world, today’s international challenges such as climate change transcend national boundaries and require multi-level governance responses. Cities, in particular, stand out as an essential governing unit with huge potentials in resolving some of the 21st century’s most pressing concerns. The recent explosion of the phenomenon of city-networks reflects intensifying city-to-city interactions in addressing global environmental issues. This article examines the case of Tokyo in addressing challenges posed by climate change. Examining the origin, development, and diffusion of Tokyo’s climate change policy, the cap-and-trade scheme was found to have first diffused from Europe to Tokyo, adjusted to adapt to the local context, then further diffused to other Asian cities. Study of Tokyo’s experience demonstrates that policy formation does not always follow a centralized, top-down, command-and-control approach. This findings challenge conventional realist conception which emphasises the dominance of central authorities and sovereign states in global policy formation. Under the framework of global governance, this article argues that cities are important sites of policy experimentation and innovation, and that the case of Tokyo demonstrates the potential of cross-country policy diffusion.

The ‘planetary boundaries’ framework identifies Earth system processes that contribute to the stability and resilience of the planet (Rockström et al., 2009a), setting out the limits to changes the Earth can support for remaining in a Holocene-like state. A key question for global sustainable development that emerges from this framework is how to secure social equity while respecting planetary boundaries. Recent efforts to quantify a ‘social foundation’ have drawn attention to the necessity of securing human wellbeing in a ‘safe and just operating space’. Yet realising the potential of this approach, we suggest, requires addressing two substantial governance challenges: how do we define and analyse success or failure in the integration of social equity in environmental governance systems?; and how do we support the emergence of those voices that are needed to make governance equitable? We argue that human rights offer a widely accepted normative basis for responding to both these questions. The body of rights-based practice offers an analytical framing and tools for development support at a time when there is an urgent need to engage with the structural problems in environmental governance. Through a rights-based approach, it becomes possible to identify and address the social relations and mechanisms that generate inequities, and which undermine progress in addressing the unsustainable use of planetary resources at multiple scales. A decade after the planetary boundaries framework first appeared, widespread exploration of the potential of a rights-based approach is overdue.

The study of planetary justice is an emerging research field that explores questions of justice on a planetary scale, particularly in the context of the profound global environmental and systemic challenges our earth system is facing. The connection between environmental conditions, human well-being, and justice and equity has been established over the past decades through both academic research, and advocacy and campaigning. However, despite the growing attention and priority of this concept, divergences exist between what is meant by ‘justice’ by different actors in all arenas, including academia. This article uses a framework first developed by Biermann & Kalfagianni (2016, 2018) for empirically analysing what concepts of justice are present in global change research, how this has changed over time, and what patterns or contradictions can be observed. By exploring what concepts, principles and mechanisms of justice emerge from global change research, the paper supports the further development of a ‘planetary justice’ research agenda in the study of earth system governance.

Solar geoengineering appears capable of reducing climate change and the associated risks. In part because it would be global in effect, the governance of solar geoengineering is a central concern. The Earth System Governance (ESG) Project includes many researchers who, to varying degrees, utilize a common vocabulary and research framework. Despite the clear mutual relevance of solar geoengineering and ESG, few ESG researchers have considered the topic in substantial depth. To stimulate its sustained uptake as a subject within the ESG research program, we identify significant contributions thus far by ESG scholars on the subject of solar geoengineering governance and survey the wider solar geoengineering governance literature from the perspective of the new ESG research framework. Based on this analysis, we also suggest specific potential lines of inquiry that we believe are ripe for research by ESG scholars: nonstate actors’ roles, polycentricity, public engagement and participation, and the Anthropocene.

Until fairly recently, consideration of religion has been marginal or even non-existent in the scholarly discourse about environmental politics. Renewed attention to the intersection of these fields has been encouraged by a recent widening in discussions of 'environmental values' to include the role of religious institutions and personal belief in forming spiritual environmental values and renewed attention to the place of ethics and religious institutions in global environmental politics. Following a range of historic declarations by religious leaders, the recent encyclical by Pope Francis signalled a new level of integration between Catholic concerns for social and environmental justice. Yet, much of the continued engagement by large environmental NGOs and governments has continued to ignore the complex interrelation of local, intermediate and transnational religious political ecology. In this article, which is based on data gathered during five years of fieldwork, primarily with British Christian REMOs (religious environmental movement organizations), I probe the complexities of political engagement with religious environmentalism which arise from the many different organizational iterations these groups may take. On the basis of such investigation I suggest that effective high-level engagement with REMO groups will be greatly enhanced by a nuanced understanding of the many different shapes that these groups can take, the various scales at which these groups organize, and the unique inflection that political action and group identity can take in a religious context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on formation of environmental policy in different periods in Lithuania. The purpose of the article is to analyze main steps of development environmental policy. Some researchers keep opinion that the beginning of environmental policy started in the interwar period. Meanwhile more environmental specialists are following position that in this period had been not founded any specialized environmental institution and the roots of environmental policy cannot be in the interwar years. Actually development of environmental policy started after Second World War in the soviet period when Nature Conservation Act has been adopted and State Nature Protection Committee, and some environmental protection agencies had been founded. The beginning of modern environmental policy started in the beginning of re – establishing of the Independent Republic when Sate Environmental Protection Department has been founded and Environmental Protection Act has been adopted. The adoption of the State Environmental Protection Strategy and the National Environmental Protection Strategy are main current strategic instruments to develop modern environmental policy in Lithuania.

Taking point of departure in the ambitious framework for ‘safe and just operating spaces’ for social-ecological systems, this paper explores the applicability of this conceptual framing. Specifically, we draw attention to limitations in the conceptualisation of justice as a question of attaining a minimal level of (material) wellbeing. With an empirical case from Laos, we apply a broader notion of environmental justice based on interconnected dimensions of distribution, procedure and recognition to examine the dynamic relationship between ‘safe’ and ‘just’ at village level, and we question how ‘boundaries’ of social and ecological sustainability are conceptualized and determined. Our findings illustrate important considerations for the way conservation interventions are rationalized and designed, in particular for the way social and environmental sustainability are portrayed and how governance is envisaged to function locally. This paper contributes to current sustainability debates on how to explore and integrate justice dimensions in development and conservation within human-defined planetary boundaries.

Reflexivity – the capacity of an agent, structure or process to change in the light of reflection on its performance – has attracted widespread support among political theorists as a virtue for environmental governance. Dryzek argues that a distinctively ecological form of reflexivity becomes crucial for governing in the Anthropocene. But there remains a need to clarify the conceptual scope of ecological reflexivity and to ascertain whether it has distinctive analytical value. A new conceptual framework for ecological reflexivity is outlined, comprising three components: recognition, rethinking and response. Through a comparative analysis of reflexivity and four related concepts – adaptive and transformative governance, experimental governance, social learning and anticipatory governance – ecological reflexivity is shown to be especially well equipped to take account of political contestation over the nature and direction of change required to respond to ecological risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Bridges different academic perspectives on macro-regional strategies by using the notion of 'functions'. • Shows that the driving forces of macro-regional cooperation are not primarily environmental. • Describes the limited capacity of macro-regional initiatives to generate governance setups needed to address major identified challenges. • Identifies the 'ontological indeterminacy' of transnational environmental regions as an additional limiting factor European macro-regional strategies (MRS) are established around physical features such as seas, mountain ranges and river basins. They focus on a new type of policy-making area (the 'macro-regions') while seeking to design and implement innovative governance approaches. They are therefore considered innovative both in their geographical focus (in the context of EU policies) and in their approach to policy design, adoption and implementation. The present article argues that the analysis of this development can usefully be informed by different theories referring to the notion of 'functions', drawn from political science on the one hand, and from geography and planning on the other. On this basis, it applies a multi-disciplinary perspective to the analysis of the role environmental issues have played in the emergence and adoption of macro-regional strategies. This allows for a comprehensive assessment of the role of environmental issues in the adoption of macro-regional strategies, as well as some of their inherent weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy scholars have effectively leveraged policy process models, theories, and frameworks to respond to a variety of important environmental questions. For example, how do environmental issues arrive on the agendas of policymakers? What factors contribute to environmental policy change? What are the designs and effects of institutions (e.g., policies or cultural norms) on environmental governance? In this review, we survey the field of policy process scholarship, focusing on environmental governance, with three objectives. The first objective is to catalog the policy process models, theories, and frameworks most often featured in studies of environmental governance. The second is to capture the methodological choices commonly employed in the application of these models, theories, and frameworks in environmental domains. The third is to identify how these approaches deal with issues central to environmental governance research, including time, space, and policy scale. We aim to identify trends and strategies for integrating key considerations of scale into empirical policy process scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructure tells a material story of ongoing challenges in cities, reflecting the diverse, normative desires of different communities. In this article we examine the introduction of green infrastructure technologies into urban infrastructure systems to think critically about these challenges and desires. Green infrastructure is an intentionally designed, multifunctional technology that directly uses or mimics the ecological processes of soils and plants (e.g., green rooftops, rain gardens, and bioswales). Facing budget shortfalls as well as demands to mitigate hazards and green the city, urban leaders are looking at green infrastructure as a facility that can provide diverse cobenefits along with traditional services. A focus on stormwater-based metrics, however—effectively reframing green infrastructure as green stormwater infrastructure—discursively tamps down alternative politics and desires for the city. Through a case study of Pittsburgh's stormwater governance, we argue that the work to (re)technologize green infrastructure as green stormwater infrastructure is an act of depoliticization that hinders needed conversations about just infrastructure outcomes. We draw on themes from qualitative interviews with community members engaged in urban water governance to suggest that these moments of transition provide an opportunity to illuminate previously obscured infrastructure politics and challenge the forms of knowledge that bind us to conventional routines of urban environmental governance. We see an opportunity to reframe the conversation in a way that opens up opportunities for historically disenfranchised communities to voice their needs beyond the technocratic problem of stormwater management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a substantial body of literature on public understandings of large-scale ‘environmental’ phenomena such as climate change and resource degradation. At the same time, political science and economics analyse the governance arrangements to deal with such issues. These realms of research rarely meet: there has been little research into people’s understandings of the governance of environmental change. This study adds a psychological perspective to governance research by investigating social representations of governance that promotes societal change towards sustainability, and related practices. It examines data from qualitative interviews with sustainability-interested people in seven European countries (n = 105). The analysis identified building blocks of representations suitable as an analytical framework for future research on governance representations. The diversity of their content reflected a range of pathways to societal change. Representations often seemed to have a creative function as a guiding vision for individuals’ own practices, but their wider transformative potential was constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 20 January 2015 Indonesia deposited its instrument of ratification for the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution with the ASEAN Secretariat, becoming the last ASEAN member state to join the treaty. Haze pollution poses a serious health threat to the people of Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, and for decades haze pollution has been a highly contentious issue among ASEAN member states. This article argues that Indonesia’s ratification will not be an immediate game changer. The mechanisms of the agreement are too weak to contribute much to a reduction of haze pollution in the region. The agreement is designed according to the ASEAN way: a non-binding approach that is based on the principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention. This makes it unlikely that the agreement itself will bring about change, even now that all ASEAN member states have ratified it.